Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (7 page)

Yet the Sultan certainly did not intend to wipe out Christianity from the city. It was not only that this would have been economically harmful; it would also have been contrary to Ottoman practice and his own beliefs. In fact, he quickly appointed a new archbishop, Gregorios, and his Serbian Orthodox wife, Mara, herself became a notable benefactress. Churches and monasteries were reconfirmed in their possessions (in one case perhaps, as a malicious fifteenth-century chronicler alleged, because the monks had helped the Turks conquer the town). In keeping with the Muslim custom in cases where towns had been won by force, a few churches were converted into mosques, looted for building materials, turned into private homes or abandoned. But how many were taken over at the start is hard to say. Anagnostes claims that only four remained in Christian hands: yet even after Murad began to bring in Muslims in 1432 many ecclesiastical foundations continued to collect substantial revenues from their estates. After all, there was no point converting churches into mosques if there were not the congregations to use them: the wave of conversion thus followed the slow expansion of the Muslim population. Of the city’s noblest buildings, Ayios Dimitrios was converted into a mosque only in 1491, Ayia Sofia and the Rotonda a century later.
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The real problem for the Christian survivors was not so much the expropriation of places of worship—for scores of them had lain within the walls before the conquest, and enough survived even after 1430 to serve the city’s sharply reduced population—as the lack of priests to run them. Many had fled or were still enslaved. Laymen were still having to chant the hymns in the church of Ayia Paraskevi twenty years after the conquest since, as one local Christian sadly noted, “the majority of the clergy and of the others were then still in captivity and this condition prevails up to today.” Orthodoxy—though recognized by the Ottoman authorities—was scarcely flourishing. “One can hear only from the more elderly people,” wrote Anagnostes after his return from captivity, “that such and such a church was here, another one was there, and what the beauty and charms of each had been.”
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As it spread into Europe, Ottoman conquest brought the Islamicization of urban life. The centre of gravity of Balkan Christianity shifted into the rural areas where monasteries, especially in Mount Athos, prospered. The cities were more deeply altered. With the newcomers came their faith, their places of worship and characteristic institutions of their way of life. A few Christians converted to Islam, both before and after the conquest, but it was chiefly through the settlers from Anatolia that Salonica was transformed—in the words of the chronicler Ashikpashazadé—from a “domain of idolatry” to a “domain of Islam.” The sounds of Christian worship—the bells, processionals and Easter fireworks—were replaced by the cry of the muezzin, the triumphant processions which celebrated a new conversion, and (later) the firing of guns at Bairam. At Ramadan, the bustle of the markets subsided, and even non-Muslims avoided eating in public, and waited for the sound of the fortress cannon at dusk to mark the onset of the nightly street feasts, parties and Karaghöz shadow puppet shows whose obscenity shocked later travellers. Minarets—spiralling, pointed, multi-coloured or unadorned—dominated the skyline and became landmarks for visitors, lit up during holidays and imperial celebrations. In 1853 the Oxford geographer Henry Tozer saw them each “circled by a ring of glittering lamps”; as he sailed away by night “they formed a delicate bright cluster, like a swarm of fire-flies on the horizon.”
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Murad’s use of the Ottoman colonization technique of forced resettlement worked: the settlers kick-started Salonica’s economy and more than doubled its population within a few years. The first extant Ottoman records, from 1478, show that unlike the Christian population, who were almost entirely descended from pre-conquest families, the Muslims were new arrivals. They were grouped in communities, each with their own place of worship. With a total of twenty-six imams, they had one religious leader for each 166 Muslims, compared with an average of one priest to every 667 Christians. Islam, newly established though it was, was thus far better served than Orthodoxy. If the urban grid—the course of the walls, the main roads, the location of markets—remained recognizably Greco-Roman, the demands of Ottoman power and the Islamic faith were nevertheless changing Salonica’s physiognomy.
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An imperial decree of 14 December 1479 appointing a teacher to a city
medrese
informs us about the spread of Muslim learning there. The appointee,
mevlana
Qivam ed-Din, was granted a salary of 20 aspers daily and instructed to pray “for the continuity of the State.” He was
to teach “sciences related to religion, to resolve the difficulties of the branches of religious law, the subtleties of the tradition and the truths of the exegesis of the Quran.” He was not only to give lessons to students, but also to look after their welfare and ensure they were properly fed “so that religion finds its glory and learning its splendour and the position of
ulema
attains the highest degree.”
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Despite the existence of this and other schools, however, Salonica never became a major centre of Muslim piety or learning. It seems to have lacked sufficiently illustrious historical, religious or emotional associations. Its
medresas
remained relatively small and undistinguished, its mosques never rivalled the soaring masterpieces of Edirne, Bursa and Istanbul—the three imperial capitals—and its
mufti
(chief religious adviser) was ranked only in the fourth class of the hierarchy, below his colleagues in the empire’s eight leading cities. Was it the vast nearby estates of the Evrenos family which reminded the Ottoman sultans uncomfortably of their early years in partnership, and led them to bestow their favour and money elsewhere? Its Balkan location probably did not help either, since Muslims there felt the presence of an alien Christian hinterland even when they controlled the towns. Mehmed the Conqueror had to remind the Muslims of Rumeli to pray five times a day—an indication that the climate of observance in the Balkans was rather different from that in Anatolia. But elsewhere in the Balkans, the towns themselves at least were emphatically Muslim—90% of Larissa’s population by 1530, for instance, 61% in Serres, 75% in Monastir and Skopje, 66% in Sofia. In Salonica, on the other hand, Muslims never dominated the city numerically, and slipped from just under 50% to 25% of the population between the mid-fifteenth century and 1530. At the time of the first census of modern times—in 1831—Salonica had the smallest Muslim population of any major Ottoman city. Yet to outsiders, its Islamic character was immediately evident. The city acquired a
sheykh
of the ruling Hanafi school of Islamic law, who acted as the chief
mufti
of the town, and, after the empire expanded into the Arab lands in the sixteenth century, jurists from the other three main schools as well. There were soon more mosques than there were churches, and
tekkes
(monasteries) were eventually established by the main mystical Sufi orders, nearly one for every neighbourhood. To the seventeenthcentury geographer Hadji Chalfa, the city was “a little piece of Istanbul.”
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M
OSQUES AND
V
AKFS

I
N MODERN
S
ALONICA
, where classical and Byzantine monuments have been shorn of the houses that surrounded them to make them stand out more prominently, one has to search for remains of the early Ottoman years. Most mosques perished in the great fire of 1917 and the surviving minarets were torn down shortly afterwards. Nevertheless, at the busy central junction of Egnatia and Venizelos streets, small shops, a disused cinema, and tourist boutiques still cling to the sides of an elegantly domed mosque, one of the last in the city. Hamza Bey was one of Murad’s military commanders, and his daughter built a small neighbourhood prayer hall in his memory in 1468. As the city expanded and prospered, Hamza Bey’s mosque grew too: it acquired a minaret (now gone) and a spacious columned courtyard.
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One other fifteenth-century mosque survives, similarly impressive in scale, though in better condition. This is the Aladja Imaret, which peeps out of a gap between rows of concrete apartment blocks above the bus stop on Kassandrou Street. The Aladja complex served as school, prayer-hall and soup-kitchen for the poor and illustrates the way older Muslim architectural forms were reworked by Ottoman builders in territories which lacked any tradition of Islamic architecture. In the original Arabic-Persian type of
medrese
, or religious school, students and teachers took their lessons in rooms arranged around an open-air courtyard. The Seljuk Turks adapted this model for the harsher conditions of central Anatolia by covering the courtyard with a dome, often adding a small prayer room at the back. Over time, the domed prayer-hall became larger still and was integrated into the main body of the building—the shape chosen by the unknown architect of the Aladja Imaret. A large airy portico runs the length of the façade, and once sheltered refugees and beggars, though it is now abandoned and covered with graffiti. The multi-coloured minaret, ornamented with stones in a diamond pattern, which gave the whole building its name (
Aladja
= coloured) has long gone, though visitors to the nearby town of Verroia will find a very similar one, half-ruined, in a side-street off the main road. This style of minaret was a last faint Balkan echo of the polychromatic glories of central Asian and Persian Islam, whose influence, as the historian Machiel Kiel points out, extended from the towns of Macedonia in the west to the north Indian plains and the Silk Road to the east.
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Fifteenth-century records identify other newly founded mosques by the names of local notables—Sinan Bey, the fisheries owner Mehmed, the teacher Burhan, Mustafa from Karaferiye, the pilgrims Mehmed, Hasan, Ismail, Kemal, Ahmed and the judge Abdullah. Their neighbourhood mosques or
mescids
must have been relatively humble sites, and the main Friday services for the city were held in “Old Friday”—the name given to the mosque founded by Sultan Murad in the Acheiropoietos Church where he had held his victory service. More substantial foundations, like the Aladja Imaret, usually required the kind of financing affordable only by notables. In this case the benefactor was another of Murad’s commanders, Inegöllü Ishak Pasha, whose illustrious career ended as governor of Salonica. Ishak Pasha spent his fortune on many noble edifices including several mosques, a
hamam
, a bridge over the Struma River, fountains and a dervish
tekke.
He was not alone. Koca Kasim Pasha, who started life as slave of an Egyptian scholar, before rising in the imperial civil service to become grand vizier, founded another mosque-imaret in the city. Yakub Pasha, a Bosnian-born vizier renowned both for his poetry and for his victories against the Austrians and Hungarians on the Croat border, endowed a mosque named after himself.

What is striking about these large-scale building projects—especially when compared with western Europe—is the speed of their construction. Often only a few years were necessary for their completion. Such efficiency implied not only plentiful skilled labour and highly developed architectural traditions, but the means to accumulate and concentrate funds for such purposes much more quickly than most European states could manage at this time. The highly centralized nature of Ottoman authority helped, but the real vehicle of urban renewal was the pious charitable foundation known as the
vakf.

The
vakf
was a well-established Muslim institution. By endowing a property with revenues from rents on shops and land, the founder of a
vakf
relinquished his ownership of the property and its endowments but in return received compensation in the afterlife, and the blessings of later generations. For the tenants of the properties and lands involved,
vakf
status was no hardship: on the contrary, exempted from the often burdensome irregular state taxes,
vakf
properties thrived and contributed to the city’s prosperity. For the donor, turning his (or her—the donors included many wealthy women) possessions into a
vakf
was also a way of ensuring that wealth passed down through the family, since relatives could be nominated as managers and trustees of
the foundation, and receive payment. Benefactors spelled out the running of their institutions down to the smallest details—saffron rice and honey on special holidays, a (lavish) evening meal of meat stew with spices and onions, boiled rice and bread for students attending school regularly.
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The imperial family set the example: Murad II himself, despite the distractions of almost incessant campaigning and his focus on the old capital Bursa and the noble mosque he was building in Edirne, commissioned the construction of several fountains in the upper town, as well as the great central
hamam
complex. He also repaired the city’s old Roman and Byzantine aqueduct system and settled colonists to look after it. His son, Mehmed the Conqueror, although hostile to the
vakf
idea in theory because it alienated land and resources from the control of the state, encouraged his viziers to build market complexes and other buildings of public utility. Bayazid II, who wintered in Salonica during his Balkan campaigns at the end of the fifteenth century, erected a new six-domed stone
bezesten
(market building), for the storage of valuable goods which is still in use today. Across the road from the Hamza Bey mosque, this elegant structure quickly became the centre of commercial life. The sultan endowed it with rents from premises selling perfumes, fruits, halva and sherbet, cloth, slippers, knives and silks, and also used the income to support the mosque he created when he ordered the church of Ayios Dimitrios to be turned over to the faithful in 1492.
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